Documentation/Events

This page tracks documentation-related talks, presentations, and workshops across Wikimedia events. Please add your session to the list below using the documentation event template.

For real-time conversations about technical documentation, join us in the #wikimedia-techdocs ^connect channel on libera.chat.

Past events

October 2024

Catalog-a-thon for GLAM tools in Toolhub

An edit-a-thon focused on adding Toolhub annotations for GLAM tools.

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• Author: User:TBurmeister (WMF)
• Date and time: Saturday, Oct 5th, 13:30 to 15:45 UTC
• Place: WikiConference North America, room IP231
• Languages: English

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• More information: Session overview, notes
• Slides: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GLAM_Toolhub_Catalog-a-Thon_WikiConference_North_America_2024.pdf

May 2024

Doc Your Tool

A project encouraging Hackathon participants to write user-friendly documentation for tools. Note: this session was not fully run as planned due to travel complications; it will (hopefully) be offered again at the 2025 Hackathon in Istanbul.

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• Author: User:Joris_Darlington_Quarshie, User:TBurmeister (WMF)
• Date and time: 2024 May 3-5
• Place: Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 (Talinn, Estonia)
• Languages: English

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• More information: Session overview

May 2023

Improve Your Technical Writing

In this interactive workshop, we'll discuss techniques to improve our technical writing, and level up our abilities to explain, convince and inspire others. We will evaluate and critique examples of technical writing in Phabricator, IRC/Slack, code review comments and commit messages.

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• Author: User:KHarlan (WMF)
• Date and time: 2023 May 21
• Place: Wikimedia Hackathon 2023 (Athens, Greece)
• Languages: English

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• More information: Session info, Etherpad notes
• Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ykDW7MM2MHxue2l7bIYD1cGw-Drsw2RUKbFcnIbmN-0/edit?usp=sharing

October 2022

WMF Data Documentathon

A presentation about documentation best practices, to support WMF data teams in undertaking a week-long technical documentation edit-a-thon that focused on documenting datasets in Datahub and on Wikitech.

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• Author: User:TBurmeister (WMF)
• Date and time: 2022 Oct 3-4
• Place: virtual
• Languages: English

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• More information: Sign-up sheet and tasks, Schedule
• Slides: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Technical_documentation_best_practices_for_Data_Documentathon_2022.pdf

May 2022

Documentation to Conquer the Dungeon

Navigating Wikimedia tech spaces can feel like crawling through a dungeon. Docs are the tools (and healing potions) we need to survive! In this session, we'll discuss how we can create excitement and peer support to help each other conquer the dungeon with documentation.

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• Author: User:TBurmeister (WMF)
• Date and time: May 21
• Place: Wikimedia_Hackathon_2022, virtual
• Languages: English

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• More information: Summary of feedback, Links to etherpads with raw notes
• Slides: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tricia_Burmeister_-_Documentation_to_Conquer_the_Dungeon_-_Wikimedia_Hackathon_2022.pdf

Template

January 2025

<event title>

<event description>

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• Author: <author - link to author's user page>
• Date and time: <date and time - link to ZoneStamp or similar service>
• Place: <event location>
• Languages: <event languages>

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• More information: <additional information (notes, Phabricator tickets, etc.>
• Slides: <link to slides>